What a time to read Megan Merchant’s new poetry collection, Before the Fevered Snow. I’ve been hunkered down in my house for five weeks now, waiting for the vicious COVID-19 pandemic to pass. Sacrificing for others. Doing my part in the face of fear, pain, and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Merchant’s book […]
Arthur Sze’s tenth book of poetry, Sight Lines, has just won the 2019 National Book Award (NBA). An honored poet with notable accolades (he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2009 book, The Ginkgo Light), his newest collection has already garnered high praise in interviews and reviews. Sight Lines […]
With his new collection On the Shores of Welcome Home, Bruce Weigl brings his expansive proclivities to a striking culmination, the poet balancing fervor and reserve, trepidation and aplomb, indignation and acceptance. In poem after poem, Weigl reexamines his Vietnam experiences, post-war realities, and the perennial effects of PTSD, offering commentaries on human nature, […]
Berlin, 02 April 2020 Dear Daniel, I think your article is terrific but here’s my issue with it. Admittedly, it is more of an issue with Anglo-American poetry criticism in general, but it’s especially relevant here, since you write about diction. You write about it in a way that […]
Daniel Tiffany’s brilliant provocation and invitation for responses is a welcome gesture to broaden and reanimate ideas about the important and overlooked role of diction in current thinking about poetry and poetics. Ironically, diction has been a central—arguably the central—critical tool in identifying and evaluating African American poetry from the […]
March, 2020 Kāneʻohe, Hawai`i Dear Daniel– Thank you for asking me to respond to your fascinating essay, “Speaking in Tongues: Poetry and the Residues of Shared Language.” Rather selfishly, perhaps, it resonated with me as a kind of manifesto-after-the-fact for Tinfish Press. I founded Tinfish in 1995 as a platform […]
THE POET AS TRANSNATIONAL MESSENGER I had only a few hours to pack and travel out of the collective sacrificing being set up in the UK in the name of elitist liberty and its self-serving dubious ideas of science and applied herd immunity. Everything that has been eroded, taken […]
POETRY UNDER LOCKDOWN (A Response to Daniel Tiffany’s “Speaking in Tongues: Poetry and the Residues of Shared Language”) As I sit down to write something in response to Daniel Tiffany’s essay, “Speaking in Tongues,” we’re entering the isolating days of the Covid-19 crisis. News of exponential increases in the […]
Begin before the beginning. As an epigraph to their recent collection Space Struck, Paige Lewis offers this passage from Book XIV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: So while they journeyed up that sloping road, the Sibyl told her story to Aeneas; they exited the underworld at Cumae, and there Aeneas offered customary […]
[ The story survived upstream of me] Jerika Marchan scatters words like driftwood. Her images float like household goods carried away in a flood. SWOLE is aware of its own interest in water: the book opens with a river, floats the reader through pages of disaster and struggle, and then […]